WHITE HALL– High school sports can represent all of the best in our children and our society. And they can sometimes represent all of the worst. We say sports prepare our children for life, and unfortunately, life can bring all of us some devastating experiences.
And when we all too often get wrapped up in winning and other things that surround the world of high school athletics, something happens, and we are all jolted and suddenly reminded that the worries, complaints, and anger we may have felt about some things are just no longer that important.
And as both a fan and as a sportswriter, having the privilege of seeing young athletes in their prime playing and exceling in the sports they love so much, it is all so tough to bear when tragedy strikes them in the prime of their lives.
If you have ever attended or been connected in some way to a school that has tragically lost a player, you know it is very hard to overcome the grief and sense of loss. If we are lucky, this never happens in our lifetimes. And most certainly, if it happens, you pray that it never happens again.
For me personally, I experienced this in a South Arkansas high school at the start of my administrative career. A player passed away from a heart abnormality during the stretching and warm-up portion of his very first high school football practice. It was a terrible event that reminded us all year just how fragile life is, and how much we allow other things to distort our proper sense of perspective of what is really important.
But for the South Arkansas school of White Hall High School, the players, coaches, parents, and entire school community have had to endure tragedy with their football program twice now in less than three months. Both incidents were off-campus events, and both have left this quiet Arkansas community reeling from terrible losses.
In May of this year, White Hall football player Benjamin Redix was killed in North Little Rock by an apparent gunshot wound. Redix was a football and track athlete for White Hall and finished second in the Class 5A triple jump at the Meet of Champs in 2023. His football coach, Ryan Mallett, spoke of the loss of Redix by saying, “Ben was everybody’s big brother. He was a natural leader. It’s hard. I loved him like my own son.”
Then tragedy struck the White Hall program again yesterday with the loss of their head football coach, Ryan Mallett in a drowning accident off the shore of Florida. The loss of Mallett, combined with the loss of one of his players, Benjamin Redix, has left the White Hall community both bewildered and disoriented as they cope with the grieving and the next steps that they face as a community and an athletic program.
We pray for the White Hall community that they have the strength to cope with these tragic events. On behalf of everyone at RNN Sports, we offer our most sincere condolences and prayers for the families directly affected, as well as everyone connected to the White Hall school community.
